Up from Down Under

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

In The Devil's Playground, an adolescent boy is shaped by his need to rebel against an emotionally repressive, provincial Catholic seminary. In The Last Wave, a middle-class lawyer is afflicted by sleep-splitting precognitive visions of approaching apocalypse. In Caddie, a young mother leaves her philandering husband and struggles to keep herself and her children alive as she descends into a Dickensian lower-class world. In The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, a 19th century black man is finally maddened by the mindless cruelty and patronization of the dominant group and goes on a murderous rampage.

Different as they are in story, mood and style, these films are linked by overriding similarities. First, and most basic, all are products of Australia's film community, probably the world's fastest-growing (75 features in the past eight years), and the work of a relatively youthful group of Australian film makers who are breathing new life into a once nearly moribund movie industry. Beyond that, most of these films deal in the search for roots that they obviously hope will sustain their new creative venturings--and perhaps make up for the general neglect of their nation's aesthetically usable past.

The signs are hopeful. The Australian Films Office has just opened in Beverly Hills, on the expectation that something like eight Australian movies will be released in the U.S. in the coming year. This week the A.F.O. is sponsoring a festival of Australian films, old and new, at New York's Lincoln Center. All this activity grew out of a remarkable government support program, which lets state agencies operate film commissions empowered to invest public money directly in private movie projects. A current government investment of around $10 million a year is the result of agitation by young people, mostly employed in television and unable in the 1960s to move on to feature film work because the small but active native industry had been virtually wiped out during World War II by profitable foreign products, mostly from the U.S.

How the new Australian films will fare in the world market is a question. The country's wild coasts and mysterious outback provide smashing settings for directors to play with, and there is an exotic quality to Australian history that makes fascinating story material. But there is an undeniable air of provincialism about many Australian films and a choice of theme often too earnestly high-minded.

Two films scheduled for American release soon look highly promising, though. One, Philip Noyce's Newsfront, is a humorous and ultimately touching history of a postwar newsreel company slipping into bankruptcy as television eats into its markets. Noyce dares to cast as his hero a round-faced, bespectacled middle-aged man (Bill Hunter), the outfit's taciturn chief cameraman. Slowly a portrait emerges of an ordinary man possessed by extraordinary integrity. In its quiet way the film becomes a glowing tribute to common decency and middle-class values -- Capra without the Capracorn.

On quite a different plane is Last Wave Director Peter Weir's earlier Picnic at Hanging Rock. Though not scheduled for the New York festival, it is a haunting re-creation of a true incident in 19th century Australian history, in which some schoolgirls disappear from an outback outing, never to be seen again, and with no satisfactory explanation for their disappearance ever discovered. Weir creates an oppressive atmosphere, a compound of heat, isolation and sexual innuendo that is quite singular. His skill at wringing terror out of emptiness and silence, his sense of the fragility and smallness of Europeans cast up in the vastness of the Australian landscape, give the film a distinction that could well bring him an international reputation. Along with Noyce and talented Realist Fred Schepisi (The Devil's Play ground, Jimmy Blacksmith), Weir forms a nucleus of directorial talent that could do for Australia what the New Wave did for France in the '50s and the Prague Film School graduates did for Czechoslovakia in the '60s -- make it at least an aes thetic force to be reckoned with on the world's screens.

-- Richard Schickel

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